Evaluation of ACPR in mixers based on a parametric harmonic-balance approach

This paper reports an extension of parametric harmonic balance (PHB) to efficiently analyze mixers excited by communications signals. In the case of digitally modulated signals, PHB is demonstrated in this paper, exhibiting reduced simulation times and memory resources. For validation purposes, a high electron-mobility transistor mixer has been constructed and characterized with single- and two-tone 2-GHz input RF signals, and also the output spectra under Universal Mobile Telecommunications System-wide-band code-division multiple-access signal excitations above the 1-dB compression point have been obtained. In addition to its fast convergence properties, the presented simulations demonstrate a very good agreement with experimental results. The close correspondence between calculated and measured spectral regrowth permitted a reliable prediction of adjacent channel power rejection